A wide area network is traditionally used to describe a set of devices, for example, personal computers, cell phones, or web servers, that are connected to each other via digital communication links that may span small or great distances. The Internet is a good example of a wide area network that predominantly connects home or business computers to larger network servers to provide services such as e-mail, web browsing, or instant messaging. Wide area networks may use a variety of protocols to facilitate digital communication over sometimes unreliable or performance varying physical mediums such as telephone wires, television cable networks, or fiber optics. Examples of such protocols include Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). These protocols are also often utilized with specific data formats such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) to transfer data between two or more points in a reliable and consistent way.
It is also useful to note that the performance of wide area networks, for example how fast data is communicated over links and what latencies exists during communication, may vary substantially when compared to other types of networks such as Local Area Networks or Storage Area Networks. For example, a personal computer using the Internet may send a message requesting a web page from a distant server where the transmission of that request may be relatively slow, for example at a data rate of only a few kilobits per second, and may have a large latency associated with it in that several seconds may pass while waiting for a response to be initiated. When a response is sent, the transmission of that response may occur at a different data rate, for example several megabits per second, allowing the personal computer to receive much more data than what was originally sent in a much shorter period of time. The times and various latencies required to transmit data over a network are important factors to be considered. More specifically, in order to improve systems and methods of communication, it is a common goal to reduce the amount of information that must be transmitted over a network. Furthermore, such improvements will often favor transmitting requests that are significantly smaller than the responses they invoke, for example, measured in the number of bytes transferred.
The above concerns and needs are evident in practically all modern manufacturing processes, including embroidery. Embroidery is the result of creating designs or artwork by sewing stitches of thread at specific locations on a substrate, for example a garment, such that the stitches when viewed as a whole create the appearance of the design or artwork. With the advent of computer controlled embroidery machines many decades ago, the process of creating embroidery was substantially improved by allowing fast and highly precise placement of stitches such that larger and more sophisticated embroidery designs could be much more easily produced. These computerized embroidery machines accept input data that effectively specifies a sequence of coordinate locations, for example x y positions, where each location is typically paired with a specific machine command, for example, sew stitch, trim thread, change needle, or the like. This is a type of embroidery data called low level input data, often referred to as stitch data. Low level stitch data can be quite lengthy and may specify designs containing sequences of many thousands of stitches. Other types of embroidery data include one or more of higher level embroidery data, vector data, composite data, low level stitch data, wireframe data, image data, rendered image data, or the like.
Embroidery data is also often created when people use embroidery computer aided design (CAD) systems or other software that assists in generating the lower level stitch data needed by computerized embroidery machines. For example, using such systems, a user may simply specify a rectangular area as well as a few parameters such as angle, stitch length, and direction to have the area filled with parallel rows of a particular type of stitching. In many cases, this is highly preferred over having to manually specify the exact location of every stitch within the rectangle. This rectangle as well as other various primitive types, for example arced or straight columns, Bezier paths, or the like, combined with user specified stitching parameters constitute another form of embroidery data referred to as wireframe data. It is often more convenient for people to manipulate wireframe data, for example to perform scaling or other editing operations, rather than adding, deleting, or moving individual stitches. Furthermore, this wireframe data is often grouped into even higher levels of abstraction such as individual letters within an alphabet to allow easier creation of wireframe data representing lettered designs in a particular font style, for example, monograms and names.
Many prior art methods exist for creating wireframe data both manually and automatically as well as methods that convert such wireframe data into other forms of embroidery data, such as lower level stitch data. Furthermore, many prior art methods also exist for previewing wireframe and lower level stitch data on a display device. For example, in some cases, stitches are represented as colored line segments or in other cases they may be rendered to look more similar to the appearance of stitches on an actual fabric substrate. Regardless of the actual rendering methods or CAD systems used, prior art here typically entails running computer software on computers that are within the same geographic location as users. Prior art does not include considerations or optimizations to allow a combination of such methods and systems to operate well over a wide area network.